The Dimond Branch Library will temporarily close for remodeling from Friday, December 23 to May 2017. For more information see the announcement.

All library locations will be closed from Friday, December 23rd through Monday, December 26th for the Christmas holiday. We will reopen on Tuesday, December 27th.

Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Mo Yan

Mo Yan of China has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is internationally known as a prolific and revered portraitist of Chinese rural life. The Swedish Academy says of his work: “Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”

Currently the Oakland libraries own most of his books that have been translated into English, in addition to works in the original Chinese. Early birds have already started placing holds on his books.

Big Breasts and Wide HipsJintong, his mother, and his eight sisters struggle to survive through the major crises of twentieth century China, which include civil war, invasion by the Japanese, the cultural revolution, and communist rule in the new China. (2004)

The Garlic BalladsThe author of the critically acclaimed Red Sorghum presents an epic story--banned in his native China--about a group of peasants who challenges the Communist authorities when they are forced to destroy their own crops. (1995)

Life and Death Are Wearing Me OutStripped of his possessions and executed as a result of Mao's Land Reform Movement in 1948, benevolent landowner Ximen Nao finds himself endlessly tortured in Hell before he is systematically reborn on Earth as each of the animals in the Chinese zodiac. (2008)

Red SorghumA story of Northeast Gaomi Township narrated omnisciently by a young man at the end of the cultural revolution. (1993)

The Republic of WinePlagued by persistent reports of cannibalism in a province known as the Republic of Wine, the Chinese government sends a special investigator to substantiate the disturbing rumors. (2000)